Posts Tagged ‘theology’
“The recognition of oneself as a part of nature, and reliance on natural things, are disappearing for hundreds of millions of people who do not know that anything is being lost.”*…
The estimable Alan Jacobs on the (glorious) novels of Robertson Davies, and (what Jacobs suggests is) a central question running throughout them: What ways of Wisdom have been discarded by modern Knowledge?…
Long ago every village in England had a cunning man, or woman—an untrained but intuitive healer, a person with a good nose for other people’s troubles and a tactical shrewdness about how to handle them. If your problems were simple and obvious, if you needed a broken bone set or a bad tooth pulled, you’d go to the surgeon. Everyone knew that. But what if you weren’t quite sure what was wrong with you? What if your spirit was troubled but also your digestion, and you didn’t know which was causing which, or if they were separate miseries? Then you needed to consult the cunning ones.
The Cunning Man is the last novel by the great Canadian writer Robertson Davies, and its titular figure is a man of the late twentieth century named Jonathan Hullah, who grew up in a remote outpost in northern Ontario and got his first ideas about healing by hanging around with Elsie Smoke, an Ojibwa herbalist and healer, a “wise woman”—a cunning woman. Hullah ultimately becomes a doctor and a practitioner of what some now call “holistic medicine,” though that term is not used in the book by Hullah or anyone else. Hullah thinks of himself as a disciple of the great Renaissance physician Paracelsus— the first person to theorize that physical disease can be the product of what we now would call psychological distress. As Hullah comments, “The problem for a Paracelsian physician like me is that I see diseases as disguises in which people present me with their wretchedness.” It is a problem because people are happy to speak of their diseases but reluctant to acknowledge their wretchedness.
Hullah’s creator almost certainly learned about Paracelsus through reading Carl Jung, who was perhaps the most important guiding figure of Davies’s intellectual and religious life. From my point of view, which is that of a generally orthodox Christian, Davies’s embrace of Jungian ideas is a convenient way to get all the benefits of belief in transcendent order with none of the obligations of obedience to a personal God. Nevertheless, there is much in Davies’s picture of the cunning man—and in closely related ideas that he developed in the latter part of his career as a novelist—from which thinking Christians can and should learn. Above all, I think, we should adopt a kind of historically aware intellectual pluralism, a willingness to learn from and make use of the past, and especially those elements of the past that have been discarded by modernity as refuse and waste. The thoughtful Christian should be a cunning practitioner of filth therapy.
In Davies’s wicked and wonderful novel The Rebel Angels, a scholar named Clement Hollier—whom Davies refers to as a “paleo-psychologist,” a student of ancient and discarded ways of thinking—grows fascinated by what he calls “Filth Therapy.” He suspects that a scientific colleague is pursuing a similar path: “He works with human excrement—what is rejected, what is accounted of no worth to mankind—and in it I suppose he hopes to discover something that is of worth.”…
…
… In his many novels Davies returns over and over again to this theme. He portrays modernity as a world in which we love our crowns even as we despise and try to rip up our roots. The Rebel Angels is the first novel in what has come to be known as the Cornish Trilogy because it deals with the Cornish family, and in the novel that follows it, What’s Bred in the Bone, a young painter named Francis Cornish struggles with his love of Renaissance painting— struggles because he doesn’t just admire the Old Masters but wants to paint as they painted. And yet, he thinks, “surely one must paint in the manner of one’s day?” Anything else is “a kind of fakery, or a deliberate throw-back, like those PreRaphaelites.” And he has a very specific reason for believing that one must choose between “the manner of one’s own day” and a historically informed “fakery”: “Even if you are a believer, you cannot believe as the great men of the past believed.”
Cornish’s mentor, a brilliant restorer of art named Saraceni, disputes this, and constantly holds out to young Cornish the challenge of acquiring “the ability to work truly in the technique and also in the spirit of the past.” And Cornish achieves this ability, at least to Saraceni’s satisfaction; but when his masterful painting is discovered to be new rather than old, it is immediately and universally decried as a fake— even though Cornish never pretended that the painting was by anyone else. For artists and connoisseurs of our age, only the crown—the thought-world of the moment—can provide an authentic and valid mode of artistic (or religious) experience. To work from the root is necessarily to be inauthentic…
…
In a city in Paraguay you may find a curious assembly of musicians called La Orquesta de Instrumentos Reciclados de Cateura—the Recycled Instruments Orchestra of Cateura. But these instrumentos are not professionally designed and built objects that have been discovered and repaired: they have been made out of recycled materials. Violins are constructed from cans and bent forks, a discarded oil drum forms the body of a cello, a saxophone somehow emerges from a drainpipe and a few bent spoons. Most of the musicians are teenagers from Cateura, which is a slum, and a slum built on and around a landfill. They too are among the world’s discards, thought to be without value, people in whom society invests no hope. But Fabio Chavez, the creator and director of the orchestra, has invested in them. He has said, “People realize that we shouldn’t throw away trash carelessly. Well, we shouldn’t throw away people either.”
In The Rebel Angels Maria’s mother healed the souls of great instruments that had been damaged by time and use. This is a wondrous art and worthy of great praise.
But then what praise is appropriate for those who have taken the filth of the world and given it souls, souls capable of the loveliest utterance? And what wonder is adequate to the imaginative dedication of Fabio Chavez, whose name should be known throughout the world? “The world sends us garbage,” he says. “We send back music.”…
Eminently worth reading in full: “Filth Therapy: A Cunning Word.” Also eminently worth reading: every one of Robertson Davies’ novels.
This essay dates from 2017. Jacobs brought it back up in response to his reading of a fascinating new book: Cunning Folk: Life in the Era of Practical Magic, by Tabitha Stanmore. It’s on Google Books, here.
* Robertson Davies, The Rebel Angels
###
As we find treasure in trash, we might recall that it was in this date in 1953 that John Kraft (the younger brother of James Kraft, the founder of Kraft Cheese [later Kraft Foods]) received U.S. patent No. 2,641,545 for the manufacture of soft surface cured cheese. Just one year earlier, the company had introduced Cheez Whiz.
“We are not what we know but what we are willing to learn”*…
Abigail Tulenko argues that folktales, like formal philosophy, unsettle us into thinking anew about our cherished values and views of the world…
The Hungarian folktale Pretty Maid Ibronka terrified and tantalised me as a child. In the story, the young Ibronka must tie herself to the devil with string in order to discover important truths. These days, as a PhD student in philosophy, I sometimes worry I’ve done the same. I still believe in philosophy’s capacity to seek truth, but I’m conscious that I’ve tethered myself to an academic heritage plagued by formidable demons.
The demons of academic philosophy come in familiar guises: exclusivity, hegemony and investment in the myth of individual genius. As the ethicist Jill Hernandez notes, philosophy has been slower to change than many of its sister disciplines in the humanities: ‘It may be a surprise to many … given that theology and, certainly, religious studies tend to be inclusive, but philosophy is mostly resistant toward including diverse voices.’ Simultaneously, philosophy has grown increasingly specialised due to the pressures of professionalisation. Academics zero in on narrower and narrower topics in order to establish unique niches and, in the process, what was once a discipline that sought answers to humanity’s most fundamental questions becomes a jargon-riddled puzzle for a narrow group of insiders.
In recent years, ‘canon-expansion’ has been a hot-button topic, as philosophers increasingly find the exclusivity of the field antithetical to its universal aspirations. As Jay Garfield remarks, it is as irrational ‘to ignore everything not written in the Eurosphere’ as it would be to ‘only read philosophy published on Tuesdays.’ And yet, academic philosophy largely has done just that. It is only in the past few decades that the mainstream has begun to engage seriously with the work of women and non-Western thinkers. Often, this endeavour involves looking beyond the confines of what, historically, has been called ‘philosophy’.
Expanding the canon generally isn’t so simple as resurfacing a ‘standard’ philosophical treatise in the style of white male contemporaries that happens to have been written by someone outside this demographic. Sometimes this does happen, as in the case of Margaret Cavendish (1623-73) whose work has attracted increased recognition in recent years. But Cavendish was the Duchess of Newcastle, a royalist whose political theory criticises social mobility as a threat to social order. She had access to instruction that was highly unusual for women outside her background, which lends her work a ‘standard’ style and structure. To find voices beyond this elite, we often have to look beyond this style and structure.
Texts formerly classified as squarely theological have been among the first to attract significant renewed interest. Female Catholic writers such as Teresa of Ávila or Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, whose work had been largely ignored outside theological circles, are now being re-examined through a philosophical lens. Likewise, philosophy departments are gradually including more work by Buddhist philosophers such as Dignāga and Ratnakīrti, whose epistemological contributions have been of especial recent interest. Such thinkers may now sit on syllabi alongside Augustine or Aquinas who, despite their theological bent, have long been considered ‘worthy’ of philosophical engagement.
On the topic of ‘worthiness’, I am wary of using the term ‘philosophy’ as an honorific. It is crucial that our interest in expanding the canon does not involve the implication that the ‘philosophical’ confers a degree of rigour over the theological, literary, etc. To do so would be to engage in a myopic and uninteresting debate over academic borders. My motivating question is not what the label of ‘philosophy’ can confer upon these texts, but what these texts can bring to philosophy. If philosophy seeks insight into the nature of such universal topics as reality, morality, art and knowledge, it must seek input from those beyond a narrow few. Engaging with theology is a great start, but these authors still largely represent an elite literate demographic, and raise many of the same concerns regarding a hegemonic, exclusive and individualistic bent.
As Hernandez quips: ‘[W]e know white, Western men have not cornered the market on deeply human, philosophical questions.’ And furthermore, ‘we also know, prudentially, that philosophy as a discipline needs to (and must) undergo significant navel-gazing to survive … in an ever-increasingly difficult time for homogenous, exclusive academic disciplines.’ In light of our aforementioned demons, it appears that philosophy is in urgent need of an exorcism.
I propose that one avenue forward is to travel backward into childhood – to stories like Ibronka’s. Folklore is an overlooked repository of philosophical thinking from voices outside the traditional canon. As such, it provides a model for new approaches that are directly responsive to the problems facing academic philosophy today. If, like Ibronka, we find ourselves tied to the devil, one way to disentangle ourselves may be to spin a tale…
Wisdom is where we find it: “Folklore is philosophy,” in @aeonmag. Eminently worth reading in full.
Apposite: “Syncretic Past.”
* Mary Catherine Bateson
###
As we update our understanding of understanding, we might send thoughtful birthday greetings to Michael Sandel; he was born on this date in 1953. A philosopher and professor of government theory at Harvard Law School (where his course Justice was the university’s first course to be made freely available online and on television, seen so far by tens of millions of people around the world), he is probably best known for his critique of John Rawls‘ A Theory of Justice (in Sandel’s book, Liberalism and the Limits of Justice).
Sandel subscribes to a certain version of communitarianism (although he is uncomfortable with the label), and in this vein he is perhaps best known for his critique of John Rawls’s A Theory of Justice. Rawls’s argument depends on the assumption of the veil of ignorance, which Sandel argues commits Rawls to a view of people as “unencumbered selves”. Sandel’s view is that we are by nature encumbered to an extent that makes it impossible even hypothetically to have such a veil. Some examples of such ties are those with our families, which we do not make by conscious choice but are born with, already attached. Because they are not consciously acquired, it is impossible to separate oneself from such ties. Sandel believes that only a less-restrictive, looser version of the veil of ignorance should be postulated. Criticism such as Sandel’s inspired Rawls to subsequently argue that his theory of justice was not a “metaphysical” theory but a “political” one, a basis on which an overriding consensus could be formed among individuals and groups with many different moral and political views.
source
“Nobody these days holds the written word in such high esteem as police states do”*…
And ’twas ever thus. Erin Maglaque explains how Robin Vose’s new history of the Index of Prohibited Books shows how Catholic censorship was, despite its totalizing ambitions, often incoherent and contradictory…
In the beginning was the Word. The trouble came afterward. How to teach the Word of God, how to translate Scripture, how to gloss and explain it: these were problems of grave concern to premodern Christians, and getting them wrong was beyond life-and-death. A bad reader’s soul was endangered for eternity. Angels didn’t have this problem. As Dante put it, angels “make themselves…completely known to each other,” communicating directly from divine spirit to divine spirit: a kind of transcendental laser beamed between celestial heads. But humans misunderstand; we grope for meaning; we struggle to be understood. From the beginning of the Catholic Church as an institution, churchmen sought to control the power of words—to shape good readers and eliminate bad ones. This meant censorship.
The Roman Index of Prohibited Books was first published in 1559. Catholic censorship persisted another four hundred years, making the Index the “longest-lived, and least understood” mechanism of censorship in history, as Robin Vose writes in a new book on the subject. At first, Catholic censorship was a relatively straightforward matter: all Protestant books, and all Protestant authors, were banned. So were books printed anonymously or without specifying a printer, date, or place of publication: these were too suspicious. It didn’t actually matter what books said; there were already too many for the Roman censors and theologians even to skim them all. By the end of the sixteenth century censors were simply copying titles from the Frankfurt Book Fair catalog into the Index. Soon, most regions—and many individual cities—had created their own indexes of prohibited books. They each had their own local persecutory flavor: in Spain, for example, the inquisitor general banned Islamic and Jewish writings, especially the Talmud. Local inquisitors in Mexico City banned books that inquisitors in Madrid found permissible.
The 1559 Index was a pet project of a conservative pope. Paul IV is maybe best known to history as the pope who had the Jews of Rome enclosed in a ghetto and gave freer rein to the persecutory impulses of the Roman Inquisition; he was hated by ordinary Romans of his own day, who burned the Inquisition office at his death. But the Index was also the culmination of pressures both inside and outside the Catholic Church, some of which had been mounting for centuries. The flourishing of heretical sects in medieval Southern Europe, such as the Cathars, and the Inquisition tribunals that arose to persecute them; the Reformation, and especially Luther’s mastery of the new technology of the printing press; the reforming voices inside the Catholic Church who sought theological uniformity and consistency: each contributed to the development of a universal Index for Catholic Europe. Soon the censors had an office in which to process great volumes of paperwork. The Congregation of the Index—a department of the Curia—was established in 1571; it worked closely with the Roman Inquisition and the Master of the Sacred Palace, the pope’s chief theologian. Everyone in Rome took a professional interest in heretical ideas.
…
Censors concerned themselves with all genres of reimagining the world, from science and political ballads to vernacular literature. Louis-Sébastien Mercier’s novel The Year 2440: A Dream If There Ever Was One (1771) tells of a Parisian who wakes up in a future society ruled by a philosopher-king, with no priests or monks, no slavery, no pastry chefs, no dance teachers, and no tobacco. (There is no accounting for utopian tastes.) It was, of course, included on the Index; Charles III of Spain was said to have burned a copy with his own hands. Other such fantasies, from Thomas More’s Utopia (1516)to Tommaso Campanella’s Città del sole (written in 1602 and printed in 1623)—which imagined a city whose walls were painted with all of human knowledge in images that “render learning easy” to its citizens—were banned too.
The promise of learning without mediation was as utopian as free love.
…
In Forbidden Knowledge: Medicine, Science, and Censorship in Early Modern Italy (2020), Hannah Marcus found that censorship in fact “catalyzed” new conversations about medicine. By asking experts to weigh in on the content of potentially heretical medical knowledge, the church effectively convened a kind of learned society for medical discussion and debate. Similarly, elite scholars were not only censored by the church but used as experts to determine whether to ban a book or how to expurgate it—that is, how to eliminate troubling passages so that the book could circulate in revised form.
Yet censorship worked as intended for the relatively impoverished and unlearned… While doctors, scientists, and aristocratic scholars could petition the Congregation of the Index to hold banned books in their private libraries, ordinary men and women in Catholic Europe had no such recourse. Some banned topics—such as forms of occult magic like divination, astrology, and hermeticism—were especially popular among elite scholars, yet laypeople couldn’t use scriptural amulets or charms for medical cures or good fortune. The Bible was translated by Catholic scholars into Polish, German, Hungarian, and Arabic, for use in conversion. But ordinary Italians were not authorized by the church to read a Bible in their own language until 1757.
…
As I scrolled through scans of printed Indexes, nearly all of which are available online, I wondered about all those authors and titles, many of which would have been lost to history if they had not been included on the Index. Possibilities of alternative worlds, alternative futures, flicker from the thousands of pages of banned books and authors and subjects: magic, flashing weapons in forbidden duels, female authors whose names are otherwise unattested, the colonization of the moon, utopian ideas, love letters, escapist romance, erotic tales, madrigals. The Indexes are a counter-archive of European history.
More difficult to account for is the toll of self-censorship: the art and literature that was never made, the religious and scientific ideas that remained unwritten—unthought, even—because of the existence of the Index, the congregation, and the Inquisition tribunal. This counterfactual European history is a history of the obscure, the impracticable, the unrecorded. It is so elusive as to remain nearly unimaginable. But for every erotic novella or psalm-inscribed jewel on the Index, a crack appears in the edifice of our historical imagination. Some light gets in. The censor is crowded out by the apparition of what might have been.
In 1574 inquisitors came to the door of Domenico, a cobbler in Spilimbergo, in the far northeast of Italy. They seized and destroyed the only three books that Domenico owned: Orlando Furioso, the Decameron, and the New Testament. Domenico responded: “I swear I shall never read again.” This was the tragedy of censorship, an unbearable narrowing of the spiritual and cultural lives of ordinary people. But I also hear in Domenico’s words his own intolerance: an intolerance of suppression, a disobedience of power. Domenico would not be told how to read. He would rather not read at all…
Too timely: “Unwanted Thoughts,” from @ErinMaglaque in @nybooks.
* Italo Calvino
###
As we listen for the rhyme, we might recall that it was on this date in 325 that Emperor Constantine, the first Roman emperor to convert to Christianity, convened the first Ecumenical Council in Nicaea (now Iznik) to discuss Arianism, a heresy arguing that Christ was subordinate to God the Father. “I entreat you,” Constantine said at the opening of the Council of Nicea, “to remove the causes of dissension among you and to establish peace.” The council attempted to resolve the bitter conflict by anathematizing Arius (Arianism’s founder) and ordering the burning of all his books. Still, the conflict raged for decades.
“Mankind is poised midway between the gods and the beasts”*…
Julius Caesar, who was deified by the Roman Senate this week in 42 BCE
At least, most of mankind. Anna Della Subin on men turned divine…
In the beginning, it was the serpent who first proposed that mankind might become divine. Ye shall be as gods, he advised, as the fruit waited…
The idea that a man might turn divine, even without intending or willing it, was to ancient Greece a natural and perfectly rational occurrence. Traffic flowed between earth and the dwelling place of the gods in the sky. In his Theogony, the poet Hesiod sang of the births of gods in a genealogy often crossed with that of humans. He told of mortals who became daemons, or deific spirits; of the half-gods, born of mixed parentage; of the man-gods, or heroes, venerated for their deeds. The theorist Euhemerus claimed he found, on a desert island, a golden pillar inscribed with the birth and death dates of the immortal Olympians. According to his hypothesis, all gods were originally men who had once lived on earth, yet their roots did not impinge upon their cosmic authority, nor make them any less divine. The ranks of the gods swelled with warriors and thinkers, from the Spartan general Lysander to the materialist philosopher Epicurus, deified after his death. In his Parallel Lives, the biographer Plutarch recorded that someone among the older, established gods was evidently displeased by the newcomer, Demetrius. A whirlwind tore apart Demetrius’s robe, severe frost disrupted his procession, and tendrils of hemlock, unusual in the region, sprouted up around the man’s altars, menacingly encircling them.
In ancient Rome, the borders between heaven and earth fell under Senate control, as deification by official decree became a way to legitimize political power. Building upon Greek traditions of apotheosis, the Romans added a new preoccupation with protocol, the rites and rituals that could effect a divine status change. For his conquests, Julius Caesar was divinized, while still alive, by a series of Senate measures that bestowed upon him rights as a living god, including a state temple and license to wear Jupiter’s purple cloak. Yet if it seemed like a gift of absolute power, it was also a way of checking it, as Caesar knew. One could constrain a powerful man by turning him into a god: in divinizing Julius, the Senate also laid down what the virtues and characteristics of a god should be…
The century that reset time began with a man perhaps inadvertently turned divine. It is hard to see him, for the earliest gospels were composed decades after his death at Golgotha, and the light only reaches so far into the dark tombs of the past. The scholars who search for the man-in-history find him embedded in the politics of his day: a Jewish dissident preacher who posed a radical challenge to the gods and governors of Rome. They find him by the banks of the Jordan with John the Baptist. He practices the rite of baptism as liberation, from sin and from the bondage of the empire that occupied Jerusalem…
In the decades after the crucifixion, just as the gospels were being composed and circulated, the apotheosis of Roman emperors had become so routine that Vespasian, as he lay on his deathbed in 79 CE, could quip, ‘Oh dear, I think I’m becoming a god.’…
In 325 CE, the emperor Constantine gathered together two thousand bishops at the Council of Nicaea to officially define the nature of Jesus’s divinity for the first time. Against those who maintained he had been created by God as a son, perfect but still to some extent human, the bishops pronounced Jesus as Word Incarnate on earth, equal to and made of the same substance as God the Father, whatever it may be. Other notions of Jesus’s essence were branded as heresies and suppressed, and gospels deemed unorthodox were destroyed. Through the mandates of the Nicene Creed, the idea of divinity itself became severed from its old proximities to ordinary mortal life. In the work of theologians such as Augustine, who shaped Christian orthodoxy for centuries to come, the chasm between humankind and divinity grew ever more impassable.
Though mystics might strive for union with the godhead, veiled in metaphors, the idea that a man could transform into an actual deity became absurd. God is absolutely different from us, the theologians maintained; the line between Creator and His creation clearly drawn.
Eminently worth reading in full: “First Rites,” a fascinating excerpt from Accidental Gods, by @annadella in @GrantaMag.
* Plotinus
###
As we delve into the divine, we might recall that it was on this date in 1953 that Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot premiered in Paris. The English-language version premiered in London in 1955. In a poll conducted by the British Royal National Theatre in 1998/99, it was voted the “most significant English-language play of the 20th century.”
Waiting for Godot, Theatre de Babylone–the first performance (source)
“Oh how wrong we were to think immortality meant never dying”*…
The John Templeton Foundation has undertaken a undertaken a deep investigation into the biology, philosophy, and theology of immortality research. Lorraine Boissoneault offers the first in a series of reports on their work…
Around 100,000 years ago, humans living in the region that would come to be called “Israel” did something remarkable. When members of the community died, those left behind buried the dead in a cave, placing some of the bodies with great care and arranging them near colorful pigments and shells. Although burial is so common today as to be almost unremarkable, for ancient humans to exhibit such behavior suggested a major development in cultural practices. The Qafzeh Cave is one of the oldest examples that humans understand death differently than many other creatures. We seem to have an innate desire to mark it with ritual.
It is an unavoidable fact of biology that all organisms die, whether by disease, disaster, or simply old age. Yet our species, Homo sapiens, seems to be the only creature blessed—or cursed—with the cognitive ability to understand our mortality. And thanks to our powerful intelligence, we’re also the only beings to imagine and seek out death’s opposite: immortality.
In religious traditions, spiritual afterlives and reincarnation offer continuation of the self beyond death. In myth and legend, sources of everlasting life abound, from the Fountain of Youth to elixirs of life. Some people seek symbolic immortality through procreation. Others aim for contributions to society, whether artistic, academic or scientific. And still others have pushed the bounds of technology in search of dramatic life extension or a digital self.
Where does this impulse come from?…
Find out: “Pre-life, Afterlife, and the Drive for Immortality,” from @boissolm @templeton_fdn.
###
As we internalize eternity, we might recall that it was on this date in 1826 that the HMS Beagle set sail from Plymouth on its first voyage, an expedition to conduct a hydrographic survey of Patagonia and Tierra del Fuego in support of the larger ship HMS Adventure.
The Beagle‘s second voyage (1831-1836) is rather better remembered, as it was on that expedition that the ship’s naturalist, a young Charles Darwin (whose published journal of the journey, quoted above, earned him early fame as a writer) made the observations that led him to even greater fame for his theory of evolution.
You must be logged in to post a comment.